Dana Benbow: Why I won't let my sons play football

The American Football Coaches Association Convention comes to Indianapolis Sunday, touting the gathering as a way to exhibit protective equipment and coaching seminars to improve safety in the sport.
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Each year when the marching band starts practicing in the high school parking lot, when store shelves are overloaded with neon highlighters and notebooks, as summer fades away, a sense of dread overcomes me.

I know it's time for the pads to come out.

No. Not the football pads. My pads. The emotional protection I must wear because I'm one of those moms.

One of those mean, overprotective moms, who doesn't let her sons play youth football. I have three boys, ages 6, 9 and 11.

I never thought about it when they were little guys, jumping around in their bouncy seats. I never sat looking at their plump little legs and said to myself: "They will never play football."

But as they grew and started playing basketball and baseball, as that dreaded season of fall rolled around, I found myself saying no to their requests to don big pads and little cleats and hit the field.

"It's not fair," my son Eli, the 9-year-old and the most adamant opposition to my stance, has been known to bemoan.

To tell you why? That's a hard one. All I know is the thought of them out on the field being hit and shoved and tackled and thrown to the ground just scares me. The thought of a concussion or a broken neck, I can't even bear.

(For full disclosure, around this time last year, Eli broke his ankle at Sky Zone, an indoor trampoline park. I then let him go sledding with that broken ankle, and he broke his wrist.)

But football. It's just different.

Maybe the sport gets a bad rap. That's what advocates will tell you. But during the 2012 season, 171 NFL players suffered concussions but that's just the reported ones. The sport itself has admitted there is need for concern. High school coaches have gone on record calling for safer equipment.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has said his No. 1 agenda is to make football safer.

In a letter to 10 million fans in the NFL database, Goodell said in October that the NFL is committed "to deliver the game that the fans love and the safety that players deserve." He also wrote that "we will continue to find ways to protect players so they can enjoy longer careers on the field and healthier lives off the field."

I could go into all kinds of studies and research. But let's just say this: The jury is still out on just how protective any of these gadgets are.

People who disagree with me, including my husband who lets his two sons play football, well, they think I'm a pansy.

After all, kids get hurt in plenty of other sports, including the ones I let my boys play.

In July, 8-year-old Dylan Williams, a Union City, Ind., boy, died after a baseball hit him in the head and neck during practice. He died of blunt force trauma. All three of my sons have played baseball.

I ruled that accident a fluke. But deep down I know it could happen to my boys. When a hard ball is being thrown fast, bad things can happen.

Then, there's hockey. Those pucks can be lethal. Kids have been paralyzed, or worse.

In 2011, Kyle Fundytus, a 16-year-old Canadian hockey player died after he was hit in the throat by a puck.

Yet football? It scares me more.

President Barack Obama has come out on my side, telling the world last year that if he had a son, he likely wouldn't let him play football.

"I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football," Obama said last January. "I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players."

Less exciting? To save lives and spines and heads? I'm down with that.

USA Football, the sport's national governing body, heartily disagrees. In a study commissioned in 2012, it revealed findings that youth football is, by all intents and purposes, safe.

The study included thousands of athletes and found that more than 90 percent of youth football players do not suffer an injury that restricts participation. Fewer than 10 percent of players incur any injury, and of those injuries, 64 percent are minor, where athletes return to play on the same day. Contusions and ligament sprains were the most common injuries.

And, in news I'm sure they thought was good, fewer than 4 percent of youth players sustain a concussion.

The study likely comforted those parents with kids playing football.

For me? All I could think about was that 4 percent.

And despite the verbal tackling I get from those who disagree, I plan to stick with my motherly instinct.